Does anyone have specific proposals for what kind of public pledge you would prefer to make, or ask people to make? Including guesses as to who would take or not take such a pledge would be helpful for assessing whether a change would be net positive.
I don’t expect CEA to implement changes to the Giving What We Can Pledge any time soon due to the substantial momentum cost but think we should focus on actionable statements to best understand what’s going on here.
“I pledge to spend N hours/year evaluating how I could do the most good in the world and what the personal cost to me would be, and publish my results.”
The N hours is still a cost rather than a result, which I dislike. I think the ultimate goal would be a moral aesthetic sense on when you’ve researched “enough”, and pledge to satisfy that. But this gets you one of the main advantages of the GWWC pledge, that it prompts you to donate and to think about your donation, without the cost of locking you in to a numbers. Yes, the pledge is fine with you donating more, but there is no mechanism for deciding when you should do so.
I have one in mind, though it’s far from finished. I asked about how the GWWC pledge interacted with my current plans, and was told (by PM) by someone from GWWC that it was within the spirit of the pledge. But, I’d rather pledge something I can follow the letter of, so have been thinking about what I actually want to commit to.
I’d like to give myself a north star of something close to: Put all available resources (both time and money), other than those required to maintain myself and those close to me as healthy, productive, and stable, humans, towards things I expect to have a large positive impact on the world.
I expect I will end up doing much more good with this as my focus, rather than some fixed % income. I also expect this is true of many of the most consequentially important people, the ones who may start new projects and open up new cause areas.
Does anyone have specific proposals for what kind of public pledge you would prefer to make, or ask people to make? Including guesses as to who would take or not take such a pledge would be helpful for assessing whether a change would be net positive.
I don’t expect CEA to implement changes to the Giving What We Can Pledge any time soon due to the substantial momentum cost but think we should focus on actionable statements to best understand what’s going on here.
“I pledge to spend N hours/year evaluating how I could do the most good in the world and what the personal cost to me would be, and publish my results.”
The N hours is still a cost rather than a result, which I dislike. I think the ultimate goal would be a moral aesthetic sense on when you’ve researched “enough”, and pledge to satisfy that. But this gets you one of the main advantages of the GWWC pledge, that it prompts you to donate and to think about your donation, without the cost of locking you in to a numbers. Yes, the pledge is fine with you donating more, but there is no mechanism for deciding when you should do so.
I like this! Especially if combined with a Schelling day for doing the thinking (possibly one winter and one summer?).
Seattle did this the last two years: https://jsalvatier.wordpress.com/2015/01/12/meetup-retrospective-donation-decision-day-2014/
I have one in mind, though it’s far from finished. I asked about how the GWWC pledge interacted with my current plans, and was told (by PM) by someone from GWWC that it was within the spirit of the pledge. But, I’d rather pledge something I can follow the letter of, so have been thinking about what I actually want to commit to.
I’d like to give myself a north star of something close to: Put all available resources (both time and money), other than those required to maintain myself and those close to me as healthy, productive, and stable, humans, towards things I expect to have a large positive impact on the world.
I expect I will end up doing much more good with this as my focus, rather than some fixed % income. I also expect this is true of many of the most consequentially important people, the ones who may start new projects and open up new cause areas.